Denis Defreyne

[dəˈni] • pronouns: he/him
hello@denisdefreyne.com
+49 1573 1969 173

I am a software engineer with extensive experience in backend and frontend development, and comfortable with infrastructure, security, and reliability. I’m good at technical writing, and have a sense of visual design and UX.

I am committed to creating an inclusive culture that’s built on communication and collaboration, and where people can learn and grow.

I use technology only as a means to an end, and what I build will put the user’s needs first, taking into account usability and accessibility.

Experience

February 2021 – present

Software Engineer, Pitch

This description intentionally left blank.

July 2020 – present

Software Engineer, closecontact

Built a privacy-first contact-sharing solution for Berlin clubs

July 2019 – December 2020

Software Engineer, BCG Digital Ventures

  • Defined the technical direction for the internal tools team, striking a balance between business needs and long-term maintenance
  • Migrated a legacy system onto a modern frontend stack (React and TypeScript), boosting development speed and quality
  • Brought consistency to the design system, and improved accessibility
November 2017 – June 2019

Software Engineer, Movinga

  • Brought consistency to the company’s infrastructure using Terraform and Ansible, reducing infrastructure operating costs by 40–50%
  • Introduced monitoring and alerting using Prometheus and Grafana
  • Tightened security of applications, services, processes, and infrastructure
  • Consolidated deployment onto one container-orchestration platform (AWS ECS)
  • Introduced design documents to the engineering department
June 2013 – November 2017

Software Engineer, SoundCloud

  • Built infrastructure for the On SoundCloud partner program, including a flexible logic engine to handle frequently-changing business needs
  • Reduced the risk of outages, and ran workshops around incident response
  • Set up a central repository for organisation-wide technical documentation
  • Introduced design documents to the team, now adopted company-wide
  • Worked with the customer support team to improve their processes and tooling
September 2010 – May 2013

Software Engineer, MediaGeniX NG

Expanded the broadcasting solution for VIMN subsidiaries such as MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon for divisions in Europe and Southeast Asia

2007 – 2009

Internships

  • At Cyan Worlds, modernized their main game site, bringing it to a #1 search result position, and set up translation workflows across seven languages
  • At Netlog, optimized an existing abuse-detection system for social networks
  • At dotProjects, developed a web-based machine translation system for large documents

Education

2005 – 2010

Bachelor of Informatics, Master of Computer Science, Ghent University

Dissertation: Design of a recommendation system for offering services on social-network sites

Community involvement

2007 – present

Nanoc

Creator and maintainer of Nanoc, a powerful static-site generator, used at at GitHub, at GitLab, at PayPal, for Prometheus, at FOSDEM, for Atom, at Disney, and in many more places.

Open-source projects

Creator and maintainer of several open-source projects, including cri, ddmemoize, and ddmetrics.

Mentoring

I have mentored a diverse group of people, as part of CoderDojo, RailsGirls, and SoundCloud’s internship  programs.

Public speaking

I regularly give talks, of which Code as data (2018), How to memoize (2018), and Let’s write a parser! (2016) are my personal favorites. For a comprehensive list, see my talks  page.

Core skills

Natural languages

fluent
Dutch, English
conversational
German

Programming languages

expert
Ruby
advanced
JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS
intermediate
Go, Java
beginner
Rust

Technologies

advanced
Sinatra, React, Ruby on Rails
intermediate
PostgreSQL, MySQL
beginner
Tableau, Node.js